Swiss Defeat Minimum Wage

by Editor
May 19, 2014 at 9:12 am

https://www.smartertimes.com/1209/swiss-defeat-minimum-wage

One of the hazards of the effort by the New York Times to remake itself as a "global" newspaper by integrating the corpse of the International Herald-Tribune is that articles show up in the U.S. newspaper that might make sense to European readers but baffle American ones. An example is a dispatch from Berlin that appears in todays Times by Melissa Eddy, a veteran of the IHT:

BERLIN — Swiss voters resoundingly rejected on Sunday a proposed minimum wage that would have been the world's highest, a move widely seen as reflecting an aversion to state intervention in the liberal economic policies that are the bedrock of Switzerland's prosperity...."Switzerland, especially in popular votes, has never had a tradition of approving state intervention in the labor markets," said Daniel Kubler, a professor of political science at the University of Zurich. "A majority of Swiss has always thought, and still seems to think, that liberal economic principles are the basis of their model of success."

This is the classical, European-style definition of liberal as free-market. To Americans used to a domestic political debate in which the "liberals" are the ones favoring a government-mandated increase in the minimum wage, this terminology is confusing. It is satisfying, or at least amusing, however, to see the Times acknowledge in a news article that it's been a free-market approach that has been the basis of Swiss economic success.

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